3 Customer Acquisition Strategies To Grow Your Business

Congratulations! You just launched your small business and have a product or service that you’re ready to share with the world. But how?

The answer is through customer acquisition, or the process of attracting customers to your business. The customer acquisition process is important because your business needs customers if it’s going to succeed.

An effective customer acquisition strategy catches the attention of prospective customers, boosts engagement, and aims for a low customer acquisition cost. It’s also sustainable, meaning that you can use it to gain customers even as your business continues to grow.

Here are three customer acquisition strategies to get you on the radar of prospective customers and grow your business:

Content marketing refers to the strategy of creating written, audio, and video content with the goal of attracting new customers, boosting brand awareness, and enhancing the customer experience for existing customers by providing them with a resource they can return to.

Content marketing provides you and your team with the opportunity to showcase your unique talents, in addition to the product or service you offer:

• If you’re a writer, consider starting a blog to be featured on your website.

• Podcasts are a great way to feature customer stories.

• You can create instructional videos to show potential new customers how to use your product or service and upload them to YouTube.

All of these examples are considered inbound marketing, an approach where customers discover your brand through content you’ve created and decide to use your product or service as a result.

While content marketing is a great way to educate your target audience and get them excited about your product or service, it can be time consuming. And there’s still the issue of ensuring that your target audience sees the content you’ve created for them. One way to optimize your content creation and strategy is the use of SEO software, which helps customers find your brand through search engine results. Another is marketing automation software, such as the example shown below, which can help you schedule and publish content as well as measure the effectiveness of individual posts.

Screenshot from marketing automation platform CleverTap, taken by author

Email marketing refers to the use of email to deliver marketing messages across your customer journey. It’s a great low-cost or even free acquisition method, and the only information you need from a potential customer is their email address.

Use email marketing to keep customers engaged in the following ways:

• A welcome email to introduce new subscribers to your product or service.

• Newsletters to inform customers about new products and ongoing events.

• Promotions to entice customers to subscribe or stay subscribed.

• Personalized correspondence based on their last purchase, or an item that they have added to their cart but not yet purchased.

eCommerce automation feature from email marketing platform, MailerLite

However, make sure you aren’t flooding customers’ inboxes, or on the flip side, emailing them too infrequently. Mark Asquith, co-founder and CEO of Rebel Base Media, suggests emailing new customers once a week. As your business grows, you can test frequency via automated email marketing.

Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms to connect with audiences to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It involves listening to and engaging with followers, analyzing data, and running social media advertisements.

Before you get started with social media marketing, it is important to create the appropriate strategy for each individual social media platform (full content available to Gartner clients):

• Use Facebook to communicate with and support customers and prospects.

• Instagram is great for adding relevant hashtags to your content that users are looking for or following.

• LinkedIn is best for building professional and business relationships.

• Use YouTube for any type of video hosting and streaming content.

As with content marketing, it helps to have the right software to automate your social media marketing. Social media marketing tools, such as the example shown below, can help you not only grow your social media presence to attract new customers, but it can help you achieve increased sales, higher lead conversions, and greater customer loyalty.

Social media management feature from planning platform Opal

These tools can also be low-cost or even free, unless you sign up for an upgraded account, such as YouTube Premium, or choose to boost your content through ads.

Whichever customer acquisition strategy you choose, make sure you know who you’re gearing it towards: your target audience.

Defining the characteristics of the people you envision using your product or service is an important step toward acquiring those people as new customers. What’s going on in their lives–are they college graduates, new parents, first-time homebuyers, newly retired? What are their interests? Where else are they shopping? Most importantly, what are their needs?

Answering these questions will give you a clearer understanding of what your ideal customer needs from you, and it will also help you to better tailor your marketing.

Something else to keep in mind before implementing any customer acquisition strategy is your customer acquisition cost (CAC), or how much money you are spending to gain new customers. If this is new to you, check out the video below to gain a better understanding of what CAC is and how to calculate it.